Double Scoop: Australia & The Spirit

Saw a couple movies this week that I’m glad I only saw once. I didn’t want to give them their own individual articles here because they honestly don’t deserve them. They weren’t quite so awful maybe; but they were pretty bad in their own special ways.

I saw The Spirit on New Year’s Eve at the Camera 12, one of my favorite theaters. Camera is independently owned locally and they have a frequent viewer discount card where you can buy a block of movies for about $6/admission and it’s good every day except Saturday night, so pick a different one for date night and it’s good. We ate at Billy Berk‘s downtown San Jose which I have to describe as an upscale greasy spoon. Kinda like a high-class TGI Friday’s– interestingly, though, all the California (and maybe more) TGIF restaurants closed just recently. If you go there with me or Julie, sit by the large airbrush painting of the scantily clad woman on the brick wall and we’ll point out the little (or should I say not so little) unrealistic things about the woman’s proportions.

If it seems like I’m avoiding talking about the movie it’s because it’s embarrassingly bad. The trailer is wonderful. The opening is perfect. After the title-card, however, it’s all downhill. For those not in the know, The Spirit is based on a crimefighting-hero comic series that ran as a supplement to Sunday funny papers. It’s brought to the screen by Frank Miller (of Sin City fame) and oh does it show.

Therein lies part of the problem. The comic book was a crimefighting story and being a somewhat family-oriented delivery method it had to walk the line between funny and hard boiled. Translating this to a film is difficult. Just look at another crimefighting comic brought to the screen: Dick Tracy. Dick Tracy embraced the colorful larger than life caricatures and laid in a confusing plot with guns, explosions, and death. Ultimately it looked good if you took individual stills from the movie, but as a whole it was kinda anticlimactic. Similarly enough The Spirit is like that. The problem is if you take individual stills from this it looks *just* like Sin City. I’ve already seen that movie, so they need more than just a look to pull it off.

Characters? Nope. It’s like they forgot to write backstory for all the characters until just before shooting; the motivations are so very hollow that you don’t root for The Spirit. He just comes off as an arrogant misogynist tool. The complete lack of character weight exists even on the badguy side– Samuel L. Jackson has been a parody of himself since Snakes on a Plane and definitely overdoes it, and Scarlett Johansson unfortunately underdoes it. The only person I cared a lick about was the doctor character and only because she seems to be the only one who experienced any real loss though her unflapping “I-must-be-the-doctor-for-The-Spirit” attitude seems really unfounded. Please don’t start me on the dialogue. It’s like they wanted every line to stand alone as a one-liner, but almost every one-liner falls flat. Did they only do one take for everything? Argh. I couldn’t even get excited from a base adolescent sex and violence kind of level. The obviously short-attention-span camerawork and the extremely heavy post processing effects make it hard to get a nice look at any of the eye candy in those departments.

In short, miss it. Watch Sin City again.

Australia we saw on Monday before New Year’s on a whim. Kevin won these tickets (w00t w00t!) then graciously gave them to us because they were for AMC theaters, and apparently those are in short supply where he lives while there are somehow 4 right around where we live. While I’m grateful for the free entertainment, I kinda wish the movies was shorter. By at least half.

The trailer for Australia certainly seems epic. I’m okay with big epic movies; I just feel like this one I’d seen before. There’s a love story in there, some country boy vs. city girl ha-ha-ha action, mystical Aborigines, drunk Australians, a cattle drive, something regarding World War II, a kid being separated from his family… Yeah. There are like 4 movies in here; and I’ve seen them all.

The authenticity of most of the non-special effects shots seem very good. Unfortunately, the non-effects shots don’t really portray very nice shots of Australia… it’s mostly shots of the outback which isn’t really that picturesque. The two bookending set pieces of the cattle drive–the red rock cliff outcropping where they spend the night and the port town of Darwin–appear to be entirely CG. Thus, the piled on special effects make everything have a glow of fake around it… which bleeds into the acting and storyline.

Otherwise, the Nicole Kidman & Hugh Jackman performances were great; probably the fact they both have a lot of family connections in Australia helped. David Wenham’s character was sufficiently bad, and his dogged need to be evil in spite of everything reminded me of the badguy on Titanic. In both cases, I think the need to have a focused nemesis is unnecessary, as the odds are still against the protagonists by the situations. Plus I think it just made the movie longer.

I’m surprised when I heard this was put to screen by Baz Luhrmann whose Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge! are among my favorite movies. I was prepared for the departure from the heavily music-driven aspects of those films, but not for the need to still have heavyhanded plot points. You can see every beat a whole mile off, and as the movie plods slowly towards them you cease to care when so-and-so dies or such-and-such surprises everyone by appearing. I did notice at least 2 ukuleles in the movie — one (maybe 2) at the ball at Darwin and there is a suspiciously 4-stringed instrument played at a campfire. Also the song played at the campfire sounds a *lot* like The Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” but seems to be uncredited.

I found myself unsurprised and uninspired by this movie as the themes are old-hat, and as a tourist-draw for Australia I think it might not do that well either — the Australians appear to be shown as drunks or otherwise underhanded folks, and the Aboriginal folks are shown as superstitious mystics. There is a side-theme of standing up to racism, but I believe it’s hampered by the fact that the white folks seem to act in undesirable ways and the indigenous folks don’t act like folks at all and seem content to live in magic.

I don’t really have a suggestion instead of Australia. Just watch something shorter.